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CHAPTER II OF A FOUR PART STORY.

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On Calle Bonita, sunrise didn’t so much arrive as seep in, the way coffee does through a paper filter—slow, warm, and carrying the faint bitterness of another day. The first soul to step outside each morning was always Reable Fisher, long before the milk truck or the air base traffic rumbled to life. She emerged like clockwork, hair set the night before into an arrangement that said I don’t have to try hard but absolutely did, holding a ceramic mug that once read WORLD’S BEST AUNT before time and dishwashing scrubbed off half the sentiment.

In front of her crouched the only thing in Del Rio larger than her reputation for correctness: a 1976 Buick LeSabre Custom Coupe, white with a navy Landau roof, 231 inches of Detroit diplomacy. Reable treated it with the reverence that some women reserved for husbands and others for Jesus Christ Superstar. She set her coffee on the hood the way a surgeon rests a palm on a patient’s shoulder, whispering a little good morning through her teeth.

“Let’s behave today,” she murmured, though the Buick had never misbehaved in its life. That was Reable—she didn’t tempt fate, even on machinery blessed with triple-chrome bumpers thick enough to deflect a meteor.

Calle Bonita sat south of the creek, a neighborhood built in the fifties when the Air Force base was booming and every third man in town had a crew cut and steady pay. Nowadays most of the houses had traded crew cuts for fixed incomes, but Reable kept her place sharp as a tack—hedges squared off, lawn trimmed, and her front-walk gravel raked into the kind of neat pattern that would’ve made a Zen monk tear up.

She jingled the keys, taking that first sip of coffee the way a general surveys the battlefield. Another day of errands, obligations, and staying one moral fencepost ahead of the neighborhood gossip.

The Shed No One Talks About

Behind her house stood a shed—white, peeling, and as private as Reable’s dating life, which is to say impenetrable. A great silver padlock the size of a baby arm hung from the latch. Kids whispered that she kept all manner of forbidden curiosities in there: dynamite, moonshine, a cousin named Luther, possibly alive. Truth was, nobody knew, and Reable wasn’t saying. Curiosity in Del Rio had a half-life of about fifteen minutes unless attached to some real danger, and this shed had danger baked into it like raisins in a fruitcake.

This particular morning, a kid pedaling down the alley slowed to a stop, gawking at the shed like it might open and reveal a treasure chest or a rattlesnake or both.

Reable turned just enough to catch him with one eyebrow.

He pedaled faster than physics strictly allowed.

Some people command attention. Reable commanded order.

The Land Yacht Rolls

With a sigh that sounded like a woman preparing to scale a moral mountain, she slid into the Buick. The interior was navy velour, tufted so deeply it could swallow a pew. The dash offered more fake wood than a funeral home and a speedometer that went to 100, though no one south of Brackettville had tried to verify it since ’83.

Reable reversed with all the precision of a mathematician. Other cars required correction, coaxing, maybe a tap or two of the brake. But the Land Yacht moved like a city bus whose patience you ought not test.

Down Calle Bonita she rolled, turning left at the corner where the creek smell always caught you—half water, half mud, half something unnameable that suggested the creek had stories too. Del Rio was a border town in the emotional sense long before immigration became a talking point. Half its people were passing through, half were staying put forever, and a third half were only pretending to do either.

Reable considered herself rooted. Deep. Like a cottonwood that knows storms come and go but the soil remains.

She kept her eyes forward, but the Buick’s hood—roughly the length of a pool table—blocked half of Del Rio from her view anyway. It didn’t matter. Reable knew the town by feel, like a blind pianist whose hands could find middle C even in the dark.

Breakfast at the Counter

The café she favored wasn’t famous, and it wasn’t trying to be. It sat near the old highway, across from a feed store that sold everything you needed to keep livestock fed and husbands humble. Inside, the vinyl booths stuck to the back of your thighs in the summer and the coffee tasted faintly of last week’s pot, but the eggs were cheap and no one asked questions.

Reable took her usual seat at the counter. Marcy the waitress, a woman with a heart like fresh dough—soft, warm, inclined to rise—poured coffee without asking.

“You’re late,” Marcy said, because Reable was five minutes behind her normal routine.

“Not late,” Reable corrected. “Delayed.”

“In this town, same thing.”

Reable allowed herself half a smirk. “Toast. No jelly. No butter.”

“You’re the only woman alive who eats toast to punish it.”

Marcy waddled off toward the kitchen window, leaving Reable alone with her mug and her thoughts—her least favorite company.

The Day Takes a Turn

After breakfast, Reable stopped at the dry cleaners near the base, where she dropped off her blouses like they were sacrificial offerings to the gods of starch. She exchanged precisely three sentences with the man behind the counter, all of them strictly transactional.

From there she drove out toward the outskirts, where a lone roadside produce stand sat beneath a sign that read MELONS, TOMATERS, AND SOME OTHER THINGS. The man running the stand nodded at her in the way men sometimes do at formidable women: respectfully, as if she might be licensed to carry both a Bible and a firearm.

She bought two tomatoes and a cantaloupe, though she didn’t care for cantaloupe. Reable believed in buying produce the way some people believe in donating to charity—necessary for maintaining a sense of moral hygiene.

Back home, she swung the Buick into the driveway, gravel spitting up like applause. That’s when she noticed the shed again, glowing faintly under the merciless noon sun. Something about it gnawed at her, though she’d never admit it aloud.

She walked past it to her kitchen door, but her steps slowed. Something was off. A sensation like a change in barometric pressure. A memory maybe. Or a warning.

Reable wasn’t a woman led by superstition, but she did know when the hair on her arms meant business.

What Lies Inside

It would be melodramatic to claim the shed held a dark secret. That’s the kind of flourish a storyteller uses to make readers keep turning pages. But the shed did hold something—something personal, something old, something not meant for sunlight. Every family has a box they don’t open, a keepsake they regret keeping, a truth they pretend is just a story.

Reable’s box happened to live in that shed.

And today, for reasons she didn’t like one bit, she found herself staring at it longer than usual.

Just then, the rumble of an approaching engine drew her attention. A neighbor’s truck eased along the alley—older Chevy, mismatched panels, bed held together by prayer and rust. Reable gave a quick wave, the kind that said I acknowledge your presence but please don’t speak to me, and slipped inside her house.

An Afternoon Errand Turns Into Something Else

Later that day, Reable ventured out again—errands piled themselves like dirty laundry, and she tackled them with the same determination. She stopped by the corner store south of the creek to buy milk, though she had half a gallon already. Routine was a structure she built and rebuilt constantly, lest the world decide to build one around her instead.

The conversation at the register was short. Reable did not do small talk. In her opinion, small talk was just gossip without ambition.

Back in the Buick, she sat a moment, both hands on the wheel, thumbs lined symmetrically. She inhaled once, long and steady. Something itched at the edges of her day—an unease. Maybe the shed. Maybe the kid on the bike. Maybe the fact that she’d been late to breakfast for the first time in a decade.

Some lives hinge on dramatic moments. Others hinge on the quiet skewing of routine.

Reable’s particular hinge was turning slowly.

Evening on Calle Bonita

Sunset reached Calle Bonita with that coppery haze it gets near the base, where jet exhaust and desert dust mingle in the atmosphere like two old lovers who probably shouldn’t be mixing but do anyway. Reable parked the Buick precisely where it always went—front wheel just kissing the chalk line in her driveway, like the car was testing its boundaries.

She stood there with her hands on her hips, surveying her lawn, her porch, her kingdom. Everything tidy. Everything in its place.

Except her.

That sense of unease hadn’t dissolved. It had grown roots.

She glanced at the shed again. The padlock glinted, a tiny moon catching the last light.

“Not tonight,” she muttered, and went indoors.

Reable ate dinner alone—chicken breast, canned green beans, half of the cantaloupe she didn’t even want. She washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away in the cabinet arranged by height. Her evening ritual was comforting, like a familiar hymn sung off-key but with earnest conviction.

Afterward, she sat on the sofa, flipping channels between a telenovela and a rerun of a show where married couples argued in kitchens decorated with avocado-green appliances. She wasn’t absorbing anything on the screen. Her mind had wandered to the shed again.

The past is never satisfied with being the past, especially in small towns where memories are stored like rainwater—kept, rationed, occasionally spilled.

A Nightwind Revelation

Around ten, a cool wind drifted through the neighborhood, rattling the pecan trees and setting dogs barking out toward Brackettville. Reable cracked her window to catch a breeze. The air smelled faintly of dust, mesquite, and something else—possibility, perhaps.

Her eyes drifted to the Buick outside, a pale shape resting beneath the streetlamp. She loved that car—not in a romantic way, but the way a lighthouse loves the sea: with respect for its power to guide or to swallow.

She thought about hitting the highway. About driving past the base, past the dark stretches of ranchland, past the place where the state line wasn’t so much a boundary as a suggestion. Thought about rolling down the windows, letting her hair blow out of its tight arrangement, letting the Buick do what it was born to do—run.

She didn’t move.

But wanting to move was a start.

Tomorrow Not Yet Written

The next morning would bring changes she couldn’t anticipate—not disasters or revelations, but small, quiet shifts that shape a life the way a river shapes a rock.

All anyone knew for certain was that Reable Fisher, woman of ritual and resolve, had started to feel the edges of her own life pressing inward.

And once a woman starts noticing the edges, she eventually pushes back.

Hard.

The shed would not remain closed forever.
The Buick would not stay parked.
And Calle Bonita would not know what hit it.

But that’s getting ahead of things.
And in Del Rio, stories—like storms—arrive when they arrive, not a minute sooner.

For now, the Land Yacht slept, Reable slept, and the night held its breath, waiting for someone to open a door they’d kept locked for far too long.

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